2021-12-21 Besu Contributor Call

(Meeting Link: ⁨https://zoom.us/j/97540031823?pwd=dEJrRW1LakFlWnZPelI3VGxoVjg2dz09)

EMEA/AMER Friendly Time -  (https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/converter.html?iso=20201012T150000&p1=224&p2=179&p3=1440&p4=195&p5=47)

• 8 AM Tuesday San Francisco
• 11 AM Tuesday New York
• 3 PM Tuesday UTC
• 5 PM Tuesday Paris/Berlin
• 1 AM Wednesday Brisbane

Agenda

•  Housekeeping
  • Antitrust notice - https://www.linuxfoundation.org/antitrust-policy/
  • This meeting is being recorded
  • Please Mute unless speaking
  • If you have a question use the raise hand feature

Discussion:

Besu Incentive Program

• Goals 
  • Teams free to do what they want with validator value and validator tx fees (rewards) 
  • Keys will be divested over 6 month periods (allowing more and more funds to be withdrawn) 
• Provide long-term incentives to folks that are building Ethereum Mainnet clients 
• Offered to all mainnet client teams (execution and consensus) 
• EF will provide validator keys at a later time depending on incentive program milestones
• Performance metrics
  • Taken over a monthly time frame
• Over 95% attestation and block proposal inclusions 
• Avoid slashing for these validators - slashed validators will be removed from the program
• Consensus client issues - EF will not penalize execution layer client for consensus issues on the other client 
• Execution layer has to be quick enough (performant) to create the block 
• Interoperability 
  • Trust in this process by EF - good faith interop (could use canary nodes for combinations that are less tested)
• Why Now?
  • Prepping for the Merge
  • Helps measure performance and confirms meeting protocol expectations
• How do we run this program across the Besu community? 
  • This is a big ask for time from community members - Not all should be forced to be node operators
• Concerns are:
  • All maintainers can't run a release 
  • Data not shared from ConsenSys with the community
  • Lack of transparency from ConsenSys team on roadmap
  • Money will make this open source project more challenging with the community 
  • PRs that need to be reviewed in timely manner
• Ideas for Incentivizing Besu community
  • Near term idea: Bounty program
  • Near term idea: Clear benchmarks/requirements for operator validator nodes
  • Medium/long term idea: Besu DAO

Next Steps:

1. More detailed document around Incentive Program on Wiki
2. Agenda for next call (potentially off-cycle):
   1. Incentive program (30 mins)
      1. Cost of running nodes
   2. Besu maintainer progress/community concerns (30 mins)

Note: We did not have time to address these other items:

General Announcements

• Release updates
  
  • Release process in general, plan for diversifying who can make a release.(Justin Florentine )
    • How many maintainers required to sign off on a release?
  • GAR-E - what does it still need to reduce friction?
  • What role (if any) does CircleCI have in releasing?
• Work Updates
  • Static code analysis (Justin Florentine)
    • Example output here: https://sonarcloud.io/dashboard?id=hyperledger-cicd_besu
    • How do we know when we should turn on build gating?
  • Matrix/Rocketchat discussion
    • asking the community (Grace Hartley (Deactivated)) 
    • Fill the survey when is coming out
  • Ongoing Vert.x upgrade Justin Florentine
  • Discussion of the Ethereum Foundation announcement
• Other Business 
• Open Forum
  • Design process proposal for further modularization:
    • transaction pooling and block building is a hot topic lately. Justin Florentinewould like to start a design for factoring out block building much like we did with the EVM. What design artifacts should we produce (if any) prior to submitting PRs?
  • Inactivity clause for moving maintainers to emeritus status - the current guide says a quarter of inactivity. Do we want to extend that? 6 months? Longer? 

    > A general measure of inactivity will be no commits or code review comments for one reporting quarter, although this will not be strictly enforced if the maintainer expresses a reasonable intent to continue contributing.

• Future Topics

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